


The Hairstyle of the Devil

by AdelaCathcart



Series: Violators [7]
Category: His Dark Materials (TV), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Adultery, Angst and Romance, Cuddling, Cunnilingus, Daemon Swapping, Daemon Touching, F/M, Foreshadowing, Jealousy, Pre-Canon, Unprotected Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:54:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23114281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdelaCathcart/pseuds/AdelaCathcart
Summary: She moves like they’ve got all the time in the world, but his nerves are racing to the finish, and if he thought mentioning her husband would slow them he was gravely mistaken, because no matter what any law or church would say this woman is his alone, and talking about it only makes the need to claim her worse.
Relationships: Lord Asriel/Marisa Coulter
Series: Violators [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1610350
Comments: 8
Kudos: 49





	The Hairstyle of the Devil

**Author's Note:**

> “I think there’s something degrading about having a husband for a rival. It’s humiliating if you fail and commonplace if you succeed.” — _Dangerous Liaisons_ (1989)
> 
> “I had come into this affair with my eyes open, knowing that one day this must end, and yet, when the sense of insecurity, the logical belief in the hopeless future descended like melancholia, I would badger her and badger her, as though I wanted to bring the future in now at the door, an unwanted and premature guest.”  
> ― Graham Greene, _The End of the Affair_
> 
> _The inexplicable charisma of the rival  
>  You said, "Describe for me the hairstyle of the devil  
> Does he make you laugh? Don't answer  
> Does he earn a lot? Don't answer that  
> Does he dress you up in black? Shut up, don't answer back  
> Just tell him I'm dying to meet him"_

“Where does he think you go all afternoon?”

“Edward? Why, he knows exactly where I am.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. At a meeting of the Ladies’ Aid Society, of course.”

“Ah.”

She’s riding him gracefully, balanced with her hands on his thighs behind her, leaning far back so his cock massages her front walls as she fucks him and he can barely stand it, his whole engorged heart is scorched by the pit of fire in her belly. She moves like they’ve got all the time in the world, but his nerves are racing to the finish, and if he thought mentioning her husband would slow them he was gravely mistaken, because no matter what any law or church would say this woman is his alone, and talking about it only makes the need to claim her worse.

“I’m about to—“ he gasps, digging his fingers into her thighs. “Where—?”

“There, right there,” she says, holding his face in her hands and pressing her forehead to his. She slams down on him again and again, fucking him with the very force of gravity. “Deeper—deeper—“

He releases staring up into her dark shining eyes, and when a groan escapes him she mimics it exactly, so that the boundary between them seems to dissolve: they are one ecstatic racing pulse, a single eternal throbbing, fulfillment itself, not flesh but spirit. Then she kisses him and he’s too dazzled to kiss her back, and they become separate again: two discrete but intersecting quantities of dead matter.

“You must've missed me,” she observes a little cruelly, still rocking on him as he grows soft. He nudges her off his lap and she gives him one last spiteful thrust before she complies. She reaches for her slip, but he grabs it first.

“I’m not done with you yet,” he snaps, tossing it across his room. “Why didn’t you meet me on Thursday? I waited for you.”

She shrugs, looking down so her hair falls in her face. “I couldn’t get away. When I finally had a moment alone there was no way for me to contact you.”

“You’d lost interest, you mean, and you didn't mind wasting my time.”

“It was too dangerous,” she insists. The haze of postcoital tenderness is rapidly receding, and too late he realizes how naive he was to try and wring an apology from her. “It wasn't worth the risk. Asriel, why are you angry with me?"

"You've always had him wrapped around your finger before. Don't tell me you're losing your touch."

"He trusts me, yes, but he’s not stupid.”

“Really? I should think he'd have to be.”

Her eyes flash as they sweep over the bedchamber, pausing with pointed skepticism on each vulnerable detail of his life she finds laid bare: the private papers scattered across the desk which he'd consulted her about last week; his hairy naked body, scarred and aging; his dæmon blinking dazed in the monkey's grip; the unlocked nightstand where he keeps his pistol. He knows she's got him dead to rights before she opens her mouth. “You must be pretty stupid yourself, then,” she says tartly.

“Not so much as that. I have no illusions about you, you know: you’re an extraordinarily faithless woman.”

“How simple the world must be to you! Everything's either true or false, everything happens now or else never. You call yourself a free-thinker but you're as rigid as an old parson. Really, I’ve known children with more patience.”

“I think I’ve been very patient. You don’t seem to appreciate that my affairs don’t stop and start according to your convenience.”

“Convenience! You think any part of this is so-called arrangement is _convenient_ for me? My marriage serves my interests, which is more than I can say for you. You expect me to give up a position I’ve worked all my life for just to be more one more accolade falling effortlessly into your lap? When was the last time you wanted something and didn’t get it?”

“You liked my lap well enough a minute ago.”

She sighs theatrically, pressing the heels of her hands hard into her eyes. “I really, _truly_ wish I didn't.”

Crossing her arms, she moves to the window, frowning down into the rain-soaked street, and silhouetted against the pale sky her body seems deceptively ethereal, crowned with a disheveled blond halo. Stelmaria rises from the monkey’s embrace by the dying fire and leans her head on Marisa's naked hip: in matters of temperance, they tend to take sides against him. Without looking, Marisa scratches the thick fur around her ears, and Asriel experiences an involuntary shiver of pleasure. A stranger who saw them together like this would think the elegant leopard dæmon belongs to her. The thought half appalls and half thrills him.

He turns away from them and gets up to stoke the fire. The sober black face at his feet looks so unfriendly that he can’t resist scooping the monkey up in one arm as if he does it every day, if only to surprise that scowl off him, and sure enough the little fellow immediately relents, clinging like he doesn’t get held enough.

Asriel feels for his paramour's dilemma, but he resents getting sucked into her schemes. When he comes to a rock in the path he doesn’t hesitate to kick it away, when a tree falls he cuts through and keeps going, but she prefers to scuttle sideways like a crab, then claim she never saw the obstacle there. She won’t leave her husband, won’t even say she wants to, pretends to be content with her life in the hands of this dull and plodding politician (Asriel doesn’t really know what the man is like, but compared with her, compared with himself, he must be excruciating) and it’s galling to say the least that she chooses security over all the freedom Asriel could offer. She’s afraid, it seems to him, like all mankind—save himself, of course—cringing under the heel of tiresome convention. It's the only explanation that makes sense, because the alternative, too poisonous and absurd to merit serious consideration, is that there's something between her and Edward Coulter he can't understand, and won't be allowed to touch.

Whatever her reasons, she refuses to relinquish her hold on either man, and Asriel hates the aftertaste of his own pettish demands, so he can only bite his tongue and bide his time, nurse his indignation in private, and when he’s with her take what she will let him have. He tells himself they belong to each other in a way that transcends ownership, and that he's better off this way, getting all the pleasure and none of the responsibility. Often he believes that. Certainly he has plenty of more urgent business to fill the time when she's not in his bed.

Ending it doesn’t cross his mind.

She and his dæmon are quietly conversing. The sound of rain muffles the sharp edges of her voice, but her agitated tone gets his attention because she's saying his name. “Asriel may think he's above such trifling concerns but surely you know better. And even if there weren't my position to consider—he'll never just let me walk away—I wouldn't care just for myself but it's your safety too—if he did something to you I—”

“We can look after ourselves,” Stelmaria reminds her.

Asriel has to interrupt. “Has he ever hurt you?”

Two female heads, spun-gold and burnished silver, swivel guiltily in his direction.

“I’ve never given him a reason to,” she sniffs, evasive.

“Marisa.”

“No, he hasn’t, but he’s…” She sighs, looking to her dæmon for help.

“Volatile,” the monkey suggests from Asriel’s arm. “He doesn’t handle pressure well. If he felt that he’d been made a fool of—“

Marisa cuts in again. “It’s his pride that would bother him, you see, the knowledge that he’d been deliberately kept in the dark about something, much more than just the…” She gestures vaguely. He reaches for her hand.

“The… ?”

She blinks at him, still tangled in her own thoughts, before his exaggerated look of innocence registers. “The _sex_ , you pig,” she laughs, breaking the tension, and he kisses her laughing mouth, and her throat, and by the time he nips at the plump side of her breast she’s not laughing anymore. She tries to bring his face to hers again but he bats her hands away and makes her sit at the edge of the bed. Kneeling before her, he lifts her thighs and pushes them apart.

“The _sex_ ,” he echoes thoughtfully. She squirms a little, but he interposes his broad shoulders between her knees so she can't close them.

“Asriel…”

“No, let me see,” he insists, spreading her open with his thumbs. “Let me see exactly what I’m risking my life for.”

He knows he’s being disgusting but he doesn’t care. With fanned fingers he exposes her swollen clitoris and spits on it so it gleams, allowing his lips to graze her with the barest suggestion of a touch. Her hips buck towards him greedily, but he immediately pulls away, and with the heel of his hand on her pubis he forces her back down to the bed. Stelmaria holds the monkey to the floor with a snowshoe-broad paw, pressing her extended claws into his narrow chest, and he doesn't try to fight her. Frustrated, Marisa groans. 

“Shhh,” Asriel scolds her, blowing cold breath on her damp skin.

His semen is beginning to ooze from her, and he catches it with his thumb and guides it back inside. Under his touch, her entrance pouts like a little mouth waiting to be kissed. He licks his thumb clean, and the mingled taste of them is so profoundly erotic that he goes back for more, then reaches above and presses it to her mouth to let her share it. She sucks eagerly. He can feel her smiling. He caresses her teeth, daring her to bite him, but she's as gentle as a lamb.

The fingers of his other hand sink into her, hot and slick like butter. He goes slow to test her patience. She begins to tense, a reflex, and he mutters, "No, not yet, be still," massaging her with steady hands until her internal muscles relax and she lies perfectly quiet, as she was told to, not the slightest resistance, though he can feel her pulse pounding around him, and her breath comes out in little urgent whimpers. She can't hide from him now: his callused fingertips find her cervix, her anus, the frenulum under her tongue. Passive receptivity is against her every instinct, openness burns her like acid, yet here she is, enduring it for him. It's more than an apology, truer than any vow because it cannot be faked or undone. Triumphant and magnanimous, he kisses her with every part of his face, milking pure sincerity out of her, bathing himself in what’s his. She comes for him and every tremor is like a thundering victory march.

When at last he opens his eyes, afternoon has given way to evening and the room is significantly darker. His lashes are matted and he can't guess with what. He’s half-hard again but he feels too lazy to do more than let it bump against her as he climbs to her side. They have nowhere else to be, her husband is away until tomorrow, and the brief flare of Asriel's temper has burned itself out. For the rest of the waning day they can be lotus-eaters.

He folds her to his breast and pulls the clean white covers over them, an isolated pocket of warmth and safety, and though he senses her mind is relentlessly ticking again, she curls into him and gradually her breathing deepens. Stelmaria leaps to the foot of the bed, dragging the defeated monkey like prey in careful teeth. She sets him down and he guides her head to rest on his golden belly like a pillow, and his black paw strokes her sleek forehead as she begins to doze. Outside the rain is nearly deafening. The bed is a raft in the storm.

Marisa whispers, her lips on Asriel's heart. “He asked about you the other day, you know.”

“He did?”

“Yes. He said, ‘Marisa, I leave you by yourself so often. A lot of young wives would’ve taken a lover to just pass the time. I think I would understand if you had. I’m sure you must get lonely.’”

“And you agreed, I assume.”

He can't see it but the smile in her beautiful eyes is like needles of ice, pure malice, for him, for Coulter, for the whole damn world. “I said, ‘Darling, how can you say such a thing? I love you, my husband, only you, always.’”

**Author's Note:**

> “The Hairstyle of the Devil” by the inimitable Momus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft1Nc5eP5vg
> 
> Lord Asriel has ADHD, pass it on


End file.
